Back in 2002 when I, with the help of Power Business Systems, started the Perth .NET Community of Practice there was a lot of emphasis being placed on building the community by Microsoft. All around the country the DPE team worked with user group leaders to help support the groups wherever possible. This included flying speakers around each month, providing content if required and helping to co-ordinate venue and catering. With a succession of failed activities, such as the MSDN Connection Program (great idea, weak implementation) and the Visual Studio 2005 launch event, to name two that come to mind, we now don’t see anywhere near the support that we used to. A lot of this comes down to budget, and the ever increasing range of developer orientated products that the DPE team have to know, promote and support.
If you check out the MSDN Australia map of the user groups, located here, you can see that there are approximately 40 user groups around Australia. You can begin to understand why the DPE budget doesn’t go very far these days – back in “the good old days” there was only really a single developer user group in each of the major cities (with perhaps the exception of Sydney and Melbourne). Having said that, someone at Microsoft should really look at this list and remove those that don’t appear to exist any more (such as Hobart) and those that don’t appear to meet any more (such as Geelong).
What I wanted to do in this post was highlight the developer user groups – the ones that are essentially the .NET user groups based in the major cities (my apologies if I don’t include your user group in this list – feel free to contact me if you want me to expand the list). Hopefully this information is correct and please contact me if you think anything isn’t accurate.
ACT
3rd Thursday of the month, lunchtime (12:30 @ King O’Malley’s Irish Pub) and evening (4:30 @ MS Offices).
Co-ordinator: Athena
NSW
1st Thursday of the month, 6pm @ AMP building.
Co-ordinators: Nick Wienholt & Dan Green
3rd Wednesday of the month, 5:30 @ MS Offices.
Co-ordinator: Adam Cogan
QLD
3rd Tuesday of the month, 5:30 @ MS Offices.
Co-ordinator: Mike Fitzsimon
Adhoc, 6pm Griffith University.
Co-ordinator: Shea Strickland
SA
2nd Wednesday of the month, 5:45 @ Innovation Centre.
Co-ordinator: Peter Griffith
VIC
2nd Tuesday of the month, 5:30 @ MS Office.
Co-ordinator: Mahesh S. Krishnan
WA
1st Thursday of the month, 5:30 @ Excom Training Centre.
Co-ordinators: Mitch Wheat & Alastair Waddell